I'm convinced of the power of VAG.COM, but a problem I've had in the past that appears to be temporarily curable by a throttle body reset would seem to make it worth having something I can keep in the car that'll do the trick. It's not practical to carry around a laptop for this purpose so I was looking at handhelds and came across the following:

VW/Audi, Seat Skoda

There are two readers on there for £60 and £70 that seems to have the majority of the feature set of the 1551/1552 units, including adaptation. For something that'll do that as well as accessing the measuring blocks and of course simply reading and clearing fault codes, that seems a remarkable deal.

Anyone got any experience of these items?

Might seem a bit of an odd question but why not sort the problem on the car?

So far it's been it's impossible to trace the fault as it's intermittent (although I now have a good idea of what might be behind it) and I think the only opportunity I'm going to have to do so is the next time it happens. Unfortunately that might be when I'm in the middle of nowhere, and history has shown that a TB adaptation usually buys me a bit of time and may be the difference between getting home and not.